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If Microsoft Built Cars...
trystanu writes "If Microsoft Built Cars, occasionally your car would just die on the motorway for no reason; you'd
accept this, restart and drive on -- at least that was the joke a few years ago. ZDNET reports that Microsoft has persuaded a number of carmakers to use its slimmed-down Windows CE operating system to power a variety of in-car electronics, from navigation systems to music players to information devices. BMW, in particular, has gravitated to Microsoft systems, although the company has announced wins with Honda, Volvo and others as well. Perhaps the recent trapping of Thai dignitaries inside a BMW should be a warning to us all."
Too bad he wasn't driving a BMW with an iDrive system, but an earlier BMW. It was a catastrophic electrical system failure that locked him in the car.
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http://asia.cnet.com/newstech/systems/0,3900115
I forget...are we at war with Eurasia or East Asia?
The little notice says you are not to even operate a hand-held cell phone in the car.
They must use some piss-poor shielding on their electronics if they are really worried about induced currents from a hand-held phone causing any problems.
Either that, or they want to scare people into buying a BMW blessed carphone from a dealership, which is much more likely.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
In the US, it's called the Magnuson-Moss Act of 1975. Google for it. It specifically prohibits product tying for warranty claims. They cannot deny your claim because you used an unapproved cell phone. There's a number of other provisions in MM that BMW seems to be trying to ignore.
Temkin
What really annoyed me was when I worked as a contractor for the Air Force, they had a fighter jet with a new computer system which would fail in the middle of the flight. After some poking around I learned it was a slimmed down version of Windows they were running.
The sad part was they tied it to the propulsion. When the computer crashed, the jet would simply shutdown and at 20,000 feet things could get interesting.
Ironically, the manufacturer provided restart instructions for the computer and claimed this was perfectly 'normal'. I don't believe this ever moved past the prototype stage.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
Embedded != Embedded. MS products maybe used in cars, but largely in the "infotainment" sector.
WinCE is much too big for the tiny microcontrollers that control engines, breakes, gear shifts and so on.. As is Java.
If you want to really what going on in car electronics look for example for the OSEK/VDX initiative, a consortium of german and french carmakers.
You had better yell profusely. With temperatures that low, and having that single point-of-failure, your frozen locks could cause you to die of exposure. That model of car should be recalled.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Consumer Reports had an article recently that mentioned this general topic. Their general suggestion was to avoid buying the new computerized luxury cars for a few years, until they get the UI right. It seems that in general their testers couldn't make much sense out of the menu-based centralized controls, and they considered these controls to be hazardous in the extreme under normal driving conditions.
BMW's newer models were not nearly the only bad examples.
Trying to discover where they've hidden some control in an N-level-deep menu tree is extremely distracting. You don't want this when you're driving.
Of course, if you screw up, the manufacturer will just call it an "operator error".
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I work at a BMW retailer and I can relate a few interesting facts about why this notice is on the car in the first place.
The number one reason is that each BMW vehicle has a personalized wiring system. Each vehicle receives a different wiring harness based upon the features and options in that specific vehicle. In other words, if one 325i has an auto dimming mirror and another does not, the entire wiring harness is different between the two vehicles.
Keep in mind that the wiring harness is like the electrical backbone of the car, weighs about 50 pounds, and runs contiguously from one end of the vehicle to the other. It is NOT something you want to mess with unless you really know what you are doing. In fact, if there is ever a problem in the wiring harness BMW recommends putting in a new one.
That brings me to reason number two. Alot of your aftermarket companies hire morons to install their electronics. I know this because I see it all the time.
For example, we had a customer buy a brand new M3 convertible (~$60K american) and they installed one of those Viper alarms that tells you to "Get BACK!" when you go near the car. The guy that installed it had the great idea of yanking out the headlight control module, chopping a piece out of the wiring that controls the headlights and splicing in there to get power for his alarm. Needless to say the car was NOT OK after this. Starting the vehicle would cause the headlights to freak out...they would switch on and off randomly. To make matters worse, the malfunction caused the autoleveling feature to kick in and make the lights to bob up and down.
This led to a cluster-f$#k with the customer and the service department. The customer was pointing fingers and yelling at the sales and service staff about what a piece of krap the car was and such. Things were pretty bad until we pulled out the light control module and showed them where the aftermarket guy had spliced in to the light system and where the control board had gotten fried.
I personally think the whole reason for the sticker is because BMW wants to maintain the integrity of the electrical system in the car and to make sure people understand that if their aftermarket device screws something up BMW is not gonna pay for it. Bmw even goes so far as to place prewiring jacks in the cars for most aftermarket devices you could want: bluetooth, satalite raio, mp3 players or line in devices for the stereo, phones, alarms, cd changers, and even Universal RF transcievers (programmable garage door opener).
You could even chalk it up to those strict German engineers if you want. God knows they hate it when people mess with their systems.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
Watch for the tsunami of lawsuits to come out of this. Some of the 50,000 highway deaths are bound to be due to software failure. And when a Ford, say, equipped with Windows is involved in a fatality, the case will attract lawyers like some kind of legal black hole. Can you imagine the prospect of picking the deep pockets of Ford and Microsoft?
Software manufacturers have been immune from this before, because everyone "knows" that computers are unreliable and crash. A jury isn't going to care that your desktop burst into flame and lost all your data. That's state of the art in the zeitgeist. But juries drive cars and are more sympathetic to claims against their makers. Do you want to be defending Microsoft when the other side shows the birthday party videos of the little girl who was immolated in the fiery wreck caused by your software?
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